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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Turn Ubuntu Jaunty into Mac OSX.

That post was written six months ago and many things have changed during this period of time: release of Ubuntu Intrepid, newer Mac4Lin theme, better globalmenu applet etc. As such, I have decided to rewrite this tutorial for the Intrepid platform.

Disclaimer: This tutorial was based on Ubuntu Intrepid and Mac4Lin RC1 themes. I don’t guarantee that it will work on other distro or other version of Ubuntu.

Download the Mac4Lin themes and extract it to your Home folder. You should see a Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 folder that contains all the configuration files in your Home directory.

Preparing the installation path

Next, in your Home directory, press Ctrl + H to reveal all the hidden files. Check if any of the three folders .themes, .fonts, .emerald exist. If not, create three folders and name them .themes, .fonts, .emerald. Create another folder within .emerald folder and name it themes.

Installing the Mac4Lin themes

Open a terminal, type in:

cd Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1sh Mac4Lin_Install_v1.0_RC.sh

This will install the Gnome themes (window border and icons), change the wallpaper and the panel background.

During the installation process, the installer will ask you for root access in order to install certain components (refer to the image below). Type y to continue.

After the installation, your desktop should look something like this:

Installing the AWN dock

(The AWN dock may/may not work in all machine. If you find that it does not work after following the instructions below, you may want to try out Cairo dock that is less demanding on the machine.)

The AWN dock requires a compositing manager to work. If your system supports Compiz, it will be able to run AWN as well. if not, we have to install the X compositing manager.

Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance, click on the Visual Effects tab. Click on the Extra radio button. If you see the following image, then your computer does not support Compiz. (If you don’t see the image below, proceed directly to install AWN.)

You have to install the alternative X composition manager

sudo apt-get install xcompmgr

Add it to your auto-start list. Go to System -> Preferences -> Session. Add the following:

Install AWN

The AWN dock is already included in the Intrepid repository, so you can easily install it by clicking this link. Alternatively, you can also type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

Once the installation is done, go to Preferences -> AWN Manager. On the left pane, click on the Themes. On the right, click Add. Navigate to the Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 folder. Open up the AWN folder and select Mac4Lin_AWN_v1.0_RC.tar.gz. Click Open. The AWN theme should be installed now. Check the radio button beside the theme and click Apply. Click Close.

Before we launch the AWN, we need to remove the bottom panel so that there won’t be an overlap. At the bottom panel, right-click the mouse and select Delete This Panel. Activate AWN by going to Applications -> Accessories -> Avant Window Navigator. You should see the AWN loading up in the bottom of the screen. To add applications to the dock, click on the Applications at the top panel and navigate to the particular application you want to add. Drag the application icon to the dock. That’s it. You should see something like the image below:

To start AWN everytime you log in, go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions. Click Add. Fill up the following:

Click Add, follow by Close. AWN will now automatically load when you login to your computer.

Installing OSX font

Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Click on the Fonts tab Change the following field to the same as the image below:

Installing Global menu

There is a repository for Ubuntu Intrepid that you can add to the sources.list, but it is not the updated version (0.6) and it is buggy. Instead, we will download the latest version (0.7.1) from the code homepage. In the future when the repository is updated to the newer and more stable version, I will update this post again.

This will create a gnome-globalmenu-0.7.1-1.fc10.i386.deb file in your Home folder. Double-click on the deb file to activate the installer. Click Install Package to install Globalmenu.

For 64-bit machine

Open your text-editor (Applications -> Accessories -> Text Editor).

Copy and paste the following:

# Uncomment to load the GTK moduleexport GTK_MODULES=globalmenu-gnome# Uncomment to tell the GTK module to open a Gtk# TreeView for all menus in the application you start.# export GNOMENU_FUN=1# Uncomment to disable global menu.# export GNOMENU_DISABLED=1# Uncomment to print a lot of debugging messages# export GNOMENU_VERBOSE=1# Uncomment to save the debugging messages to the given file.# export GNOMENU_LOG_FILE=/tmp/gnomenu.log# uncomment to disable the plugin for specific programs.# export GTK_MENUBAR_NO_MAC="fast-user-switch-applet"

Save the file as .gnomerc in the Home folder.

In your terminal,

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line to the end of the file. Save and close.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ubuntu intrepid main

Back in your terminal,

sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install gnome2-globalmenu

Now, on the top panel, remove all the icons and menu from the left side of the panel. Right-click on the icon and select “Remove from panel”.

On the right of the top panel, remove the logout icon. Still on the right hand side of the top panel, right click and select ‘Add to panel‘. Scroll down the list and add ‘Search for files‘. This will add the spotlight icon to the panel.

On the left of the top panel, right click and select ‘Add to panel‘. Scroll down the list and add Main Menu and Global Menu Panel Applet.

The Globalmenu might not appear or work well after you have added it. Logout and login again and you should see the globalmenu working perfectly on the top panel.

Right click on the globalmenu and select Preferences. Check “Enable Global Menu” and unchecked “Icon”.

The globalmenu is compatible with most of the GTK application. However, some programs, such as Firefox will not work with it.

Creating Dashboard effect

We will use a combination of screenlets and Compiz widget plugin to achieve the dashboard effect.

Alternatively, you can also type the following command in terminal to install:

sudo apt-get install screenlets compizconfig-settings-manager

Go to System->Preferences->CompizConfig Settings Manager. On the Left, click on Desktop. On the right, put a check beside ‘Widget layer’

Go to Applications –>Accessories->Screenlets. Activate the widgets that you want to display. Right click on the widget and select ‘Properties’. Go to Options tab and select ‘Treat as widget’. Do this for all the widgets that you have activated.

You can now see your dashboard in action by pressing F9.

Fixing up some small detail

Until now, your desktop should be very close to a Mac desktop, but there are still some small details such as the Gnome icon at the top panel, mouse cursor etc. Let’s fix them up now.

3. Navigate to /.icons/Mac4Lin_Icons_v1.0_RC/scalable/places. Scroll down to find the images distributor-logo.png, gnome-main-menu.png, main-menu.png and start-here.png. Note that all of them are the same image. Rename them to distributor-logo.png.old, gnome-main-menu.png.old, main-menu.png.old and start-here.png.old respectively.

4. Now, with the apple icon that you have downloaded, make four copies and rename them to distributor-logo.png, gnome-main-menu.png, main-menu.png and start-here.png. Copy and paste all of them to the folder.

5. Logout and login again. The logo at the top panel should change to the apple icon now.

Configuring usplash screen

Until now, you have done up the interior, it’s time to fix the exterior: usplash screen and grub screen.

Install startupmanager by clicking here or type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Go to System -> Administration -> Startup-Manager. Click on the Appearance tab.

Press the Manage bootloader themes button. This will pop up a window allowing you to select the background image for the GRUB.

Click on the Add button and navigate to File System –> Home –> Username –> Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 –> GRUB. You should see three files. Refer to the below screenshots on how each file looks like. Pick the one that you like best.

Back to the main window, select the image from the drop down bar. Remember to check the box “Use background image for bootloader menu”.

There is a bug in Ubuntu Intrepid that prevent the user from changing the usplash screen. We have to do a workaround using splashy. Here’s the hack for it:

Well, I had to change the ppa to reference Jaunty instead of Intrepid; figured out how to get the GPG key; installed gnome-globalmenu instead of gnome2-globalmenu...all that pretty much took care of it.

Thanks again for a pretty sweet setup. A change to the Firefox theme, and I'm mighty impressed.

I am having a problem with it saying that your sreen is not composite and try using compviz(-fusion) upon starting the AVN. Please let me know how to correct this. this is not letting the dock work. until i tried the 64bit global menu installation it was working.

For anyone having issues when installing splashy from repos in ubuntu jaunty (see remark from BigFatGeek), take a look at post 19 in this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/splashy/+bug/328089

Hi,Thank for your clear guide. Im a new linux user. After the installation of the Mac OSx-like desktop, I found I cant more run compiz cube animation. I cant understand why. Before this installation, I could switch on the "Extra" effects on the Visual Effect menu with no problems. Now the message "Desktop effect could not be enabled" just appears to me (never happened before). As you suggest in the guide, i tried to install Xcompmgr but after this configuration i've got problems also with the AWN applications bar which didnt display at the startup.I have an Intel GMA 900 well supported on my Ubuntu 9.04 release. Well before the desktop changes. Can you please help me?

It is good to learn new things everyday!In fact, there are lots of features shown in here which I had no idea they existed. This way, I have another chance to give a try to new things such as theses.Eventually, I will be coming back to see if there is something up.Thanks for everything and have a nice day! just as I did when I found this wonderful site